I spent the first week of the month in San Francisco at Oracle’s customer event, OpenWorld 2017 and when I wasn’t drinking from an information fire hose, it was alternately fascinating and exhausting. There were major announcements in database, blockchain, AI, cyber security, and other stuff I have only a tangential association with. For instance my eyes glaze over when they start talking about bare metal servers and going serverless so I’ll limit these observations to database and security with a few dashes of other things.

But primarily this OpenWorld was a coming out party of sorts in which the culmination of billions of dollars of investments in advanced technologies became unavoidably visible. From here on Oracle might still support its legacy customers but make no mistake, they are legacy and the future is at minimum about moving the datacenter to the cloud and moving your traditional licenses there. Oracle even has a name for that practice BYOL or bring your own lice

Oracle is making that task as easy as it can be and I spoke with customers who were doing it or just finishing who were pleased with the experience. We don’t often think about it if we keep to the big picture but there are a lot of old systems in the enterprise that need to be replaced because they no longer support their missions. There is no better indication than that for determining that the next few years will be full of stories about cloud migration.

The key to successful and necessary transfer to the cloud is Oracle’s autonomous database, 18c. The new product will be available by end of year and is supposed to self-provision, self-maintain and self-patch while running thus eliminating the need for most downtime. CTO and founder Larry Ellison said that it takes an average of 13-14 months from when a patch is available to when it is installed in a majority of customer shops. If a patch covers a security problem that leaves bad guys a huge amount of time to steal data, which has become epidemic.

As Ellison said in his opening night keynote, “People are going to get better at stealing data, and we have to get better at protecting it.” Fair point. The database will be a big part of that protection along with some semi-autonomous security software (that will become autonomous soon enough). Both products rely on Oracle’s AI and machine learning tools as well as advanced database hardware.

That’s the catch, but it seems eminently reasonable: you have to be on Oracle gear to get the full benefits of the software’s power. Actually it’s less of a catch than you might think. While there are enterprises that are big enough to need and to purchase the hardware, many if not most, customers will receive the full benefits of Oracle’s technology as consumers of its cloud services. So many of these announcements can be rightly seen as further inducements to move to the cloud.

Ellison is fond of saying, “You can get all of this, but you have to be willing to pay less.” That’s fair if you’re looking at the monthly or annual subscription charge but one suspects that over time many companies will be paying more overall though there’s the issue of refresh that many companies avoid but which are a standard part of the cloud. We’ll see, in the end you get what you pay for.

Oracle also announced a foray into blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that provides greatly enhanced security, speed, and transparency to inter and intra-company transactions. For instance you will soon be able to use blockchain to track the provenance of parts in a supply chain, and one can only hope that credit reporting adopts similar safeguards in the future. We can also hope to track some customers and their purchases that way, especially in a B2B setting to facilitate sales.

Lastly, there’s AI and data. Whether it’s called AI or machine learning, the technology requires lots of data to train a model to be useful in predicting the future. Most enterprise data is deficient in one or more axes of data on hand so Oracle’s solution has been to provide clean data to augment private data and deliver the big picture view that’s needed in sales, marketing, service and a lot more. Oracle also introduced a new set of IoT applications aimed at specific business outcomes. It’s impossible not to say more about this later.

But to summarize, Oracle’s long-term investment in cloud technology has begun to pay off. We’ve seen this in the company’s earnings reports over the last year and OpenWorld was a kind of coming out party for numerous solutions at literally every level of the software (and hardware) stack. The company will be a formidable competitor in the years ahead as its legacy base is up for grabs. They’re all going to move to the cloud at some point and Oracle wants to keep them. Other vendors with good solutions are competing at every level from Amazon and Google to Microsoft, SAP, and Salesforce. This will be fun to watch.

Well-known CRM analyst and thought leader, Denis has made contributions to our thinking about cloud computing, CRM, social media, analytics and mobility. He runs the Beagle Research Group, LLC and is the author of "Solve for the Customer", "You Can't Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It", and recently, "The Age of Sustainability". He frequently contributes to this and other outlets. Check out BeagleResearch.com, and AgeSustainability.com